Random Acts of Senseless Violence - The center cannot hold
07/26/20 • 51 min
We talk about Jack Womack's "Random acts of senseless violence" - a "minute into the future" dystopia told from the perspective of a 12 year old girl. It's gritty and depressing, just our speed.
Topics include:
How this is a horror story for the Bourgeois
The atomization of daily life
Hobbesian themes
Derrida and the duality between center and periphery
The merits of a political book with no obvious villain
The violence/mundanity barrier
We talk about Jack Womack's "Random acts of senseless violence" - a "minute into the future" dystopia told from the perspective of a 12 year old girl. It's gritty and depressing, just our speed.
Topics include:
How this is a horror story for the Bourgeois
The atomization of daily life
Hobbesian themes
Derrida and the duality between center and periphery
The merits of a political book with no obvious villain
The violence/mundanity barrier
Previous Episode
Splendor, Misery, Time and Resistance
We talk about a Sci-fi album by the band Clipping - Splendor and Misery. The album is a prime example of Afro-Futurism, dealing with such topics as time, space, bodies, space travel, slavery, and much more that we couldn't cover.
The discussed album:
https://clppng.bandcamp.com/album/splendor-misery
Topics discussed:
Queer time and its relevance to race theory
Space, resistance and the body
Belonging
Alternate futures in space
Anger as a political emotion
Anarchy and violence
Next Episode
Shadowrun; Acceleration and Mosaics
We talk about the pen and paper role playing game Shadowrun, focusing on the themes it allows its players and storytellers to explore. Shadowrun is a troperific mix of sci-fi and fantasy that takes everything that's wrong about the world and blows it up at the same time.
Subjects discussed:
Accelerationism and the Frankfurt school's influence on it
Reclaiming Cybernetics
Meaning in postmodern works
Mosaicism
Exceptionalism
Radical infrastructure space
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